Jim Casada Outdoors
May 2016 Newsletter
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May's Enduring Magic
May possibly ranks as my favorite month of the year, although October
would certainly give it a run for the money. It’s a time of early
harvest, of the garden beginning to show real promise, of bedding bream
and rising trout, and of spring in all its lushness. In my part of the
world the threat of frost is gone, but nights remain comfortable or even
a tad chilly, while daytime has none of the withering heat and humidity
to be faced in coming months.
May is also a month that sets my already strong bent for nostalgia into
overdrive as I look back on all the month meant to me as a boy. Here are
some of those warm memories, and I’m betting that most of you will share
some of them along with calling to mind a whole bunch of others of your
own.
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Barefootin’ it. By month’s end, if I played my cards just
right and the weather cooperated, Momma would let me shed my shoes
for an hour or two in the late afternoon after school. How wonderful
it was to feel the cool grass beneath my feet, to walk through a mud
hole squishing water and mud between my toes, or to wander through
newly plowed ground feeling and smelling the good earth.
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School getting out. Unless we had had a lot of “snow days”
that state law required to be made up, school normally ended the
last week in May. The heady thought of three months of freedom, of
entire days of leisure (I conveniently ignored chores such as
weeding and hoeing the garden, mowing the lawn, and as I moved into
my teens, summer jobs of one type or another), and of fishing to my
heart’s content was more than enough to carry me through end of the
semester exams and other bothersome realities.
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Catching and selling night crawlers. Warm spring showers
bring thoughts of procreation to the worm world, and when that
happens those giants of the underground, night crawlers, do exactly
what their name suggests—they crawl at night. A fellow with a
flashlight, a big bucket with some moss in it, and a quick hand
could catch what for a boy was a minor fortune in an evening’s work.
Night crawlers brought a penny apiece, and earning three or four
dollars for a couple of hours “work” was big money in the 1950s. It
wasn’t really work at all but rather a nocturnal delight. Mind you,
I’m sure that much stooping, bending, and grabbing would bring a
quite different perspective from me today (and overall soreness on
the morrow).
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Catching and selling spring lizards. Another way of picking
up some money was catching spring lizards (that’s what we called
them, though they were actually salamanders) to sell to bait stores.
Good ones fetched three cents apiece and the red speckled ones
brought a nickel. Much like dealing with night crawlers, this
involved quick hands and scrambling in seep branches and springs
while turning over rocks. I now know that it’s easier to catch them
at night (their eyes light up under a flashlight’s beam), but in
today’s world there are severe limitations on what types are legal.
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Camping trips in the back country. The first weekend in May
brought the opening of trout season in the Great Smoky Mountains
National Park, and I don’t think I missed an opener from the time I
was 11 or 12 years of age until I went off to college. Most of the
backpacking trips were to the headwaters of my “home” stream, Deep
Creek, at a place known as Poke Patch. I remember bitterly cold
wading; one outing when temperatures dropped so low there was a skim
of ice in the water bucket; and feasts of fried trout, ramps, and
branch lettuce. I didn’t own a sleeping bag and a single Army
blanket was my bedding. Obviously I was far hardier as a boy than is
true today.
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Jim's Doings
Some aspects of
my monthly activities follow a predictable pattern, and since I
don’t think I’ve ever shared them I thought it appropriate to do
so. Each Monday, if I haven’t already done so, I complete and I
send in my weekly column for the Smoky Mountain Times,
the little newspaper serving the place I grew up, Bryson City,
the county seat of Swain County tucked squarely away in North
Carolina’s Great Smokies. The title of the column is “Mountain
Musings and Memories,” and that’s exactly the nature of the
material. The good folks at the newspaper let me range fairly
widely and have done so for somewhere around 600-700 consecutive
columns. I might look back with fondness on a youthful fishing
trip, share memories of some special person or event from days
gone by, or delve into history. For example, right now I’m
writing a five-part series on the Great Depression in Swain
County.
It hit the
region terribly hard, being even more devastating than the
undeniably terrible economic suffering felt across the nation.
That’s because of multiple factors making matters worse, most
notably coinciding exactly with the demise of the American
chestnut and takings by eminent domain of the farms and homes of
hundreds of hardy mountain folks. Almost certainly many of them
put the money they received with the seizure of their land,
piddling though it was, in a local bank that failed. It’s such a
sad, solemn story I’ll be compelled to take a brighter note when
the series is over.
Then every other
week I craft a column for the local daily newspaper where I now
live, the Rock Hill Herald. I’ve written for them for
upwards of three decades, and I guess there’s a commentary on
the state of daily newspapers in our world when I note two
things. First, I’m pretty certain my byline began appearing in
the newspaper prior to the employment of any of their current
staff, and I’m even more certain I could walk through the doors
and not a soul on the premises would know me. Newspapers have
changed, and dramatically so.
I’ve been
connected with Sporting Classics magazine for 34 of its
35 years of existence, and there’s no question that linkage has
meant more to me as a writer than any publication for which I’ve
produced material. These days the publication appears eight
times a year, and as Editor at Large and Book Columnist I
contribute the occasional feature, write a review column in
every issue, and am involved in various projects behind the
scenes on pretty much an ongoing basis. Right now I’m busy
selecting material for a forthcoming anthology on quail hunting.
Then there are
periodic assignments of all sorts. The current issue of Smoky
Mountain Living has a feature of mine on a mountain
Renaissance man, Judge Felix Alley, as well as a shorter and
hopefully somewhat humorous piece on ramps (a particularly
strong-smelling member of the leek family for those of you who
might not be familiar with the wild vegetable). I just finished
a little article for the National Wild Turkey Federation’s blog
on how I’ve always kept a record of turkeys I have killed by
saving the spent shell, writing up a story of the hunt, and
sticking the story and the bird’s beard in the shell. Recently I
completed an afterword for a special publication of a Rutledge
story, “The Ocean’s Menace,” to be published as one in a series
of five chapbooks bringing to light five long forgotten tales of
his (I also wrote the general Foreword being used in all five of
the chapbooks).
I’ve just begun
what promises to be a fine working relationship with Carolina
Mountain Life magazine. My premier contribution to the
publication, “The Magic of Marbles,” is in the current issue. It
takes a longing look back to when every boy worth his salt
played marbles during the spring. Apparently they liked my work
because in a recent conversation with the publisher, she invited
me to contribute a column to each issue. It will likely carry
the title “Mountain Wisdom and Ways” and will indulge in the
kind of nostalgia connected with high country lifestyles and
traditions I so cherish.
Throw in some
garden work, an ample measure of frustration in the turkey woods
(it has been my worst season ever, by far, and the first time
since I started hunting turkeys that I haven’t killed a bird in
South Carolina), occasional work on a food blog I write for
Leica, and you pretty well have it except for one thing. I’m
spending far more hours on “Profiles in Mountain Character” than
anything else, thanks to the fact that the manuscript is due in
early fall. |
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 Trout fishing. I not only fished on the weekend backcountry
trips. Sometimes Daddy would rush home from work and we’d get three
hours or so of late afternoon fishing in, but more commonly I rode
my bike up to the home of my buddy whose father was a Park ranger
and we fished lower Deep Creek or Indian Creek.
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Eating trout. Fresh from the stream and properly prepared, I
would make a strong argument for trout being in a culinary class by
themselves when it comes to freshwater fish. To be sure, a strong
case can be made for walleye, crappie, bream, and perch, but for my
part I’ll take trout. Mind you not just any trout. I want small
ones, and if it’s legal I’d actually prefer those only five or six
inches in length. If not, then I want those just big enough to keep.
These smaller fish, prepared the way I like them best, can be eaten
bones and all (see recipes below).
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Tubing. In today’s world tubing in the Smokies has become so
popular I don’t even like to be in the most popular spots during
peak season, but in my youth only locals did it. Any time there was
a heavy rain and the creek rose appreciably in May was considered a
prime time, because the stream really moved along at a rapid pace
and there was no worry about wedging on rocks in low water
situations. However, those rides were normally punctuated by a
near-constant sighting of water snakes (perfectly harmless) dropping
from limbs of bushes and trees overhanging the stream. Snakes were
far, far more common than they are in the region today. I don’t have
a certain explanation but strongly suspect it involves the fact that
wild hogs eat snakes whenever they find them.
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Proms. Although I will readily admit my number one interest
throughout my teen years was outdoor activities, it would be wrong
to suggest I had no interest in the fairer sex. I still harbor fond
memories of my senior prom and can mentally walk through everything
involved from when I first picked up my date (a former “steady”
girlfriend who had rightly ceased to be my steady when I got
involved in some silly “two timing”—I doubt if the word “steady” or
the phrase “two timing” get much if any usage today) at the home of
her aunt and uncle right through to evening’s end.
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 Gardening. It may seem strange for a teenager to have enjoyed
gardening, but I did. I loved helping Dad and Grandpa Joe put in
crops. Whether it involved onion sets, seed potatoes, cabbage
plants, tomato plants, or seeds, I was intrigued and happy to be a
part of it. Indeed, so much was that the case that during several
boyhood years I raised my own little garden patch in addition to
helping out with ones that had real meaning since canning produce
was an important part of our livelihood.
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Enjoying the first produce from the garden. Greens, lettuce,
kale, radishes, and the like will all have “made” before the month
of May ends, and even today, when fresh vegetables adorn grocery
shelves, there’s nothing to match garden truck. Or, to put it
another way, there’s fresh and there’s garden fresh, and
knowledgeable folks realize a wide gap separates the two (see “kilt”
lettuce recipe below).
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Picking wild strawberries. Depending on the elevation, wild
strawberries began to ripen late in May or early in June. They
seemed to be far more plentiful than today, perhaps because there
were a lot of old fields and pastures that hadn’t yet grown up to
the point where the wonderful little red orbs got shadowed out.
Izaak Walton once wrote that “doubtless God could have made a better
berry, but doubtless God never did.” I’m wholeheartedly in his
corner in that regard. A dead ripe wild strawberry, whether eaten
fresh, used in shortcake, made into jam, or as topping for cereal,
is pure, unbridled delight.
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Putting pennies on the railroad tracks. I’m sure this was
illegal, although I’d like to think it wasn’t dangerous. All I know
for sure is that the trains in Bryson City would do a marvelous job
of flattening out one of the old copper wheat pennies. If you know
the phrase, “flat as a flitter,” it was certainly applicable in this
case.
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Starting another warm month’s period of sharing time with Al
Dorsey, an aged river rat who had spent time in the state
penitentiary for murder, was a rank stranger to soap and water (and
the rank is used advisedly as well as being drawn from a Ralph
Stanley bluegrass classic), and knew more about catfishing than
anyone I’ve ever met. Born into a prominent family, he had a rough
life but found some peace in the end with conversion, cleaning up,
and becoming an active member of the local Baptist Church. Just
recently an ideal tombstone has been placed at his previously
unmarked grave.
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Whittling. Honesty compels me to admit I don’t do nearly as
much whittling as I did when a boy, although I still feel naked
without a pocket knife. That reduced amount of whittling probably
says something about me, and I’m not at all sure it reveals anything
positive. A fellow who whittles, whether he’s shaping a slingshot or
some craft item or merely making shavings, has time to contemplate;
to enjoy the pleasant sight of a sharp blade cutting through wood in
clean, sure fashion; and to rest his soul. All of those are good
things.
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Kibitzing. A fair amount of the whittling I did as a
youngster, not to mention a passel of it done by my elders, took
place on the town square in Bryson City. The place went by two
colloquial names—the one acceptable in any company was “Loafer’s
Glory” while the less proper but more expressive one was “Dead
Pecker Corner.” Call the location what you may, it was a gathering
place for old men to swap lies, swap knives, play checkers, listen
to itinerant preachers known as “Bible Thumpers” on Saturday, and
offer a world of often unwanted but readily proffered criticism.
That might involve a move in a checker game, a fellow’s choice of a
pocket knife, the way he whittled, or indeed most anything. Thanks
to a great 9th grade English teacher by the name of Thad DeHart, I
added the word kibitz to my vocabulary at the age of fourteen, and I
witnessed a world of it and even did a bit (although usually just as
a quiet aside to Grandpa Joe) when a youngster.
The title of a book by one of my favorite outdoor writers, Archibald
Rutledge, pretty well sums up my memories of May in yester-youth. The
title is Those Were the Days, and my how I cherish them still. If
you were lucky, indeed flat-out blessed, you had at least some of the
memories noted above, no doubt buttressed by others depending on the
location and time of your childhood, to treasure.
Speaking of Rutledge, a number of you have already requested
notification when the book Bird Dog Days, Wingshooting Ways, an
anthology of his writings on canine companions and the upland shooting
life, appears. It is on track for July, and you’ll hear from me as soon
as it arrives. Also, if anyone hasn’t notified me and is interested, let
me know.
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RECIPES
PAN-FRIED MOUNTAIN TROUT
Two or three small trout per person
Stone-ground cornmeal
Salt and pepper
Clean trout (there is no easier fish to clean—I provide full details on
how in my book, Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park: An Insider’s Guide to a Pursuit of Passion, which is available
through this website) and then place inside a Ziploc bag in which you
have placed cornmeal and salt and black pepper. Shake thoroughly until
each trout, including the body cavity, is thoroughly covered in meal.
Place in a piping hot frying pan with enough lard or vegetable oil to
cook them quickly (do not use olive oil). Cook until golden brown on
both sides, turning once. If cooked with the oil just right—not too hot
to burn them but you need to have sufficient heat to “seal” the flesh
immediately—you can eat small trout bones and all. Or, if that bothers
you, eat down the rib cage much like you would attack corn on the cob.
Serve with fried potatoes and onions, a wild lettuce salad (or slaw) and
finish off with one of my favorite back country sweets, peach or apricot
crisp (recipe below).
CAMPSITE PEACH OR APRICOT CRISP
This is a great recipe for the backpacker, because it involves minimal
weight.
Dried apricots or peaches, placed in sufficient water to rehydrate them
prior to cooking
Brown sugar
Crumbled Ritz crackers or graham crackers
Three or four ounces of rum
Place rehydrated fruit in a large camp frying pan and crumble brown
sugar on top of it. Then cover completely with the crackers. Cook until
the juice from the fruit is bubbling to the top and sprinkle on the rum.
Cook for another two minutes and serve hot.
TROUT ALMANDINE ON THE TRAIL
This is a fine “fancy” dish for a backcountry fishing trip, but it works
perfectly well at home too.
2 small or one medium trout per person
Smoked almonds
Lemon juice
Margarine or butter
Chop the smoked almonds and melt butter in a frying pan and sauté them.
Add lemon juice and stir until thoroughly heated. Keep mix hot while
preparing trout by frying them in butter, turning once. When the trout
are turned, top with the almond and butter sauce and finish cooking
serve piping hot.
TROUT OMELET
2 cups cooked and flaked trout
6 large eggs
2 heaping tablespoons cottage cheese
½ cup minced onion
½ cup chopped mushrooms
½ cup fresh spinach, chopped
Sour cream
Butter
Mix eggs and vegetables in a small bowl then combine with cottage cheese
and beat until fluffy. Pour into a buttered frying pan and cook slowly
on low heat until the eggs start to set. At this point pour fish mixture
on top, add a dollop of sour cream, and then carefully fold to finish
cooking the omelet. Season with salt and pepper and top with paprika or
chopped parsley if desired. Serves three or four.
TROUT CORDON BLEU
2 medium trout
4 slices Swiss cheese
2 slices cooked ham
¼ cup tomato sauce
2 tablespoons smoked almonds, chopped fine
1 beaten egg
Flour
Bread crumbs
Butter
Season the trout with salt and pepper and roll in flour. Then dip in
beaten egg and roll in bread crumbs. Stuff each trout with two small
slices of cheese a slice of ham, a portion of tomato sauce, and a
tablespoon of smoked almonds. Fry carefully in butter, turning once and
checking with a fork. The fish is done when it flakes. Serves two.
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